Rapunzel's Tower
by ArchivistGardener
Summary: ONE SHOT about a girl named Molly and her true love. She's his Rapunzel. It's about growing up and making your happily ever after instead of waiting for it to come to you. Also about indecision and disillusionment with perfection.


Molly twitched the long brown hair off of her shoulder. Her usually smiling lips formed a slight frown and her eyes were half shut in apathy. She didn't really feel like moving from where she sat at that exact moment.

The three walls of the room in which she was sitting were mostly windows and sun streamed in through them only to cover cheerily upholstered furniture. _This_, she thought as she looked at the sparkling tiles, _is not my idea of happily ever after_. But this was where her road had taken her. All of the choices she had made along the way had brought her to this spot – this doom that she had chosen of her own free, though deluded, will.

When she had graduated from high school, there were so many paths to choose from. There had been so many ways to make her dreams come true. She chose a humble path, full of humble ambitions. Her boyfriend said she could do better, that she deserved to be better. Her true friends said they knew she would be great at whatever she chose to achieve. Her conscience said it was the right decision. Her heart shouted with glee at the years of happy work ahead.

And what happy years those were. Friendship, goals, ideals, future had been established. It was all a framework for life later on. Molly had been terribly pleased. It pained her to leave the sweet things of childhood behind, but it thrilled her to welcome new adventures with open arms. She was a girl who had nothing but who had it all.

Graduating four years later was an epoch for Molly. While some roads had been closed while she had whiled away that time, new ones had sprung up in their places. She got in her old, beaten up car and drove away from four years of perfection.

By now, however, her sense of direction had changed. For better or for worse, Molly could not tell. She hadn't needed it while she had been safe in the protecting arms of the castle she had called school. Behind those fortified walls of knowledge and dying childhood, she had looked at the streets through rose colored glasses. She had seen the lights of the world as a fair ground waiting for her. Molly's car chugged through the streets and she knew not where she went. She simply drove. Here she took a left and then a right.

And then she rode up to her future in her falling apart car. She came to a stop at the building. Molly grinned in spite of herself at the school. Something about it made her think of a cottage. It certainly wasn't a cottage; it was much too big. Perhaps then, it was the way she looked at it – the way she saw her dream job as her finding her little niche in the world. And she felt after all that she still knew how to get to where she meant to go.

Molly remembered very clearly getting the job. She had been ecstatic. She had called her parents, her friends, anyone she could think of to tell the news to, because this was her future. The best future she could ever want was this one because it was the one she had dreamed of so many times during school. The time of her life was at hand along with more years of beautiful work. She felt like she could simply roll in the mess that was her life at that point because it smelled so good to her. It smelled so right. She wanted to parade that before everyone – the evidence of her chaotic but perfect life.

A couple months passed and her lovely mess got even better than she could have hoped. Molly fell in love. Molly fell in love with a set of piercing gray eyes and a shock of windswept red hair. She loved his laughter, his quirkiness, his thoughts, his conversation, his presence, his thoughtfulness, his everything. He in turn loved her. The dear boy that had captured Molly's heart loved her for exactly who she was. It wasn't love at first sight. Molly didn't believe in that bit of stupidity.

At first she liked the way he looked. Then she liked the way he looked _at her_. His name was Troy and the first thing he ever said to her was that she had amazingly long hair. She made him think of Rapunzel. Molly had blushed furiously, but she loved that she had. After a while, she liked the way he was nervous when he asked her out to dinner. She thought it was adorable that she could make him blush in return.

A year or so later, Molly knew she was in love. But she didn't know what to do about it. She didn't know what to do next, and surely "next" was about to happen.

She waited and nothing happened. Her next step never came. Was it that her foot refused to move or that the road didn't rise to meet her like it should have? Another year went by, and she was still in love, but she didn't think she could handle it. Molly just knew she wouldn't be able to deal with being in love and waiting. What if Troy did not love her back? What if his cute sexiness had caught the eye of a gorgeous blonde girl? What if the first thing he ever said to her was that she made him think of Cinderella? But when he looked at her that night, love radiating from those smoky gray eyes, she decided she could wait a little longer.

In a month's time, they had had an argument. Sitting there in the sunlight, she couldn't even remember what it had been about. Well, Molly couldn't remember what it had started with. She knew deep down what it had been all about. That invisible elephant had finally made her so sore that she had refused the next step.

She told him she was thinking about cutting her hair.

He asked her why she would do that.

Molly said she wanted to be more attractive.

Troy looked dumbfounded. She was beyond attractive to him and he said so.

She shouted then. She asked him why he didn't love her.

He said he did.

Yelling, she asked through the unshed tears of her heart why he hadn't asked her to marry him or even make a commitment. With those words she suddenly knew what the next step had been that she had waited for so anxiously. This was what she wanted to share with him because he was her other half and she wanted to wake up every morning to his smile. She wanted everyone to know how much she needed him. She wanted to live happily ever after with the man she knew would always be her prince charming.

He said nothing. As he opened his mouth, she turned and fled the room as if fleeing a bullet aimed at her heart. She did not want to hear what he was going to say, whether it was good or bad. Troy ran after her desperately and asked the question she had been burning to hear come out of his lips. It was the sweetest thing that had ever come out of those lips but the words burned her painfully. Now that she had realized what she wanted she was stupidly and insanely afraid of the next step. She couldn't fathom why. It was what she wanted but now Molly was afraid of taking the wrong step. Could she make a wrong choice? She wasn't sure, so she ran away.

She floored the pedal of her car, now more beat up than ever, and sped away from all of her dreams. She found herself at another school in another town, but this one wasn't filled with the happiness the previous one had exhibited. This building was like a tower. They had wanted her, she had the credentials and now she had the experience. But she wasn't a teacher here. She was an administrator. And the tower that she ruled seemed to mock her because it was as tall and as unfathomable as her old ideals had been. Her ideals were all she had left, she decided. They were all she had to build on. With them, she would construct her new, her better life – her life without him.

Walls went up and they grew in monstrosity. Molly did not care. She was happy, she told herself constantly. These things made her happy. She rented a nicer apartment than her older one. It was more spacious, more sunny, more everything. Somehow, however, it was very empty. Molly told herself she wanted something to fill it.

She found another prince – a single dad. He was meticulous, neat, dark, mysterious, brooding, and Byronic. He was the unattainable man. To him, she was the perfect woman: ambitious, peerless, beautiful. He visited on Friday evenings. He brought her flowers every visit. He complemented her incessantly but he never, ever called her Rapunzel and she never cut her hair.

So there Molly was on a Saturday morning in her apartment thinking about their date the night before. He had told her that he thought the world of her as they held hands at a romantic restaurant.

She asked him what he meant.

He said he meant that he thought she was an amazing person.

Molly still didn't know how to take this comment but tucked it away with the napkin she put on the table.

He said he wanted to spend the rest of his life with her.

She asked him why he would want to do that.

He replied that he thought he had made himself perfectly clear. Molly supposed that he had but the whole thing felt surreal to her.

He repeated himself impatiently.

Molly looked at his perfect face and saw instead the red hair and gray eyes of another boy. When her suitor's mien reappeared her heart leapt out of her chest and uttered the only words it could present to this man who was not its other half:

"No."

Molly smiled and explained. He didn't seem to understand and she felt badly but she knew that she had answered correctly. Her sense of direction seemed to have been repaired after months of not pointing her the right way.

The next morning, however, Molly was still unhappy because this seemed to be the end but she didn't want it to be. She was still locked in the tower that she had created. Now her hope and realization had brought her to the window to look out at the world wistfully. This was not the way it was supposed to end.

Molly knew she was right when her doorbell rang and she left the too sunny room for the door of her apartment. She hoped it wasn't her rejected suitor.

But it wasn't.

It was Troy. His hair was redder and more windswept than she remembered and his gray eyes were blazing. When he saw her he glared but then he grinned sheepishly and then looked apologetic and blushed.

She loved that she could make him blush.

He looked at her tenderly and the first thing he said was, "You didn't cut it."

She knew he meant her hair.

"No."

"Why?"

"I don't know." But she knew and she hoped he saw it in her eyes.

He did.

"Can we – is there any way – I mean – don't cry, Molly…" He reached up and touched her face gently. She was crying harder than she had when she had left him. She was crying because she loved that he had come back, that he had found her when she had lost her way.

"Yes."

"Will you – could you ever marry me? Not right now necessarily, but later – maybe?" He looked so adorable when he was nervous.

"Yes." He leaned in then and picked up the end of her French braid and kissed it very softly.

"My Rapunzel." Molly was trembling but it stopped when he brushed his lips against hers like it was their first kiss all over again. "My Molly. I'm so sorry, Molly."

She smiled against his lips. She forgave him. He had climbed the tower and rescued her from her their combined mistakes. He had followed her and she had let him in. She had kept that way open for him. She had remembered him with her hair and his fairytale nonsense.

The kiss lengthened and she sighed when they broke apart. His chin rested on top of her head and her cheek lay against his shoulder. It felt so right. She knew that this was her happily ever after.

**I hope you guys like it. I know it's pretty simplistic but I enjoyed writing it. Please review.**


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